The Conch Train Doesn`t Stop Here

September 15, 1985|By David A. Kaufelt, (David A. Kaufelt is the author of 10 novels He lives on Sugarloaf Key.

Alot of people looking for Key Largo, the film, end up in Key West, the location. Today, Key Largo is about as Humphrey Bogartish as Cleveland, but Key West still maintains the raffish quality that has made it synonymous with outlaw romance. Don`t get me wrong. Key West is getting prettier by the minute but you can still find some authentic remnants of Cayo Hueso if you`re willing to move out and get down.

One of the beautiful things about Key West as a vacation destination is that you can have any kind of holiday you want. You can, for example, take out a second mortgage on your house, fly down and rent a car (Avis is at the airport; Hertz is not), then check into the elegant Casa Marina (built by Flagler, now owned by Marriott) on the Atlantic or the glamorous, jet-setty Pier House on the Gulf. You can spend your days barbecuing your flesh in the subtropical sun, slurping banana daiquiris, hiring yachts to take you fishing in Hemingway`s turquoise waters, shopping innovative, flashy Fast Buck Freddie`s. You can while away your nights at Louie`s Backyard or La Terrazza de Marti (La Te Da to those who know) or Poor Richard`s Cafe (once a good slummy bar with its balcony falling off, now Key West`s latest ``in`` eatery). In other words, a Mercedes-Benz of a vacation.

Or, you can pack up the family Ford and chug down the Overseas Highway, 100 miles of the most beautiful waters you`ve ever seen occasionally made ironic by some of the worst urban sprawl. You can check into Days Inn or the Ramada and set the kids loose in the pool while you do the shopping centers (Sears, Zayres, J. Byrons). You can load up on carbohydrates at Burger King, MacDonald`s, the I-Hop, the Colonel`s, and the shopping-center Chinese, meticulously replicated from your hometown Chinese right down to the shrimp in lobster sauce. You can go to Smathers` Beach and play volleyball and fish off the White Street pier and wander through Hemingway`s house and the extraordinary East Martello Museum. A family vacation.

Or, you can break out and experience the hard underbelly of the sort of life that has given Key West its reputation for partying, for possessing that razor-thin edge of danger that some find fascinating and others wouldn`t cross with an armed guard. If safety, cleanliness and gentle people aren`t the first three requisites on your vacation list, read on.

You used to be able to get a pretty good contact high just by going down to Mallory Square for the sunset ritual. Now, what with the encroaching condos (one that already failed is now a hotel promising ``a suite time``), the politicization of the venders, and the increasing media-ization of the event itself (``Folks come from all over the country to see the sun set at Mallory Square,`` hypes one tourist-development type), you have to go out to Stock Island to get the smell, taste and feel of a real Key West sunset.

ROY`S COW KEY Marina is just off U.S. 1 and the Cow Key Channel Bridge, a 10-minute ride from the T-shirt boutiques on Duval Street. It`s not much of a marina. Roy doesn`t sell bait (despite the ``bait`` sign half falling off the roof) and the rusting gas pump has holes in it. There`s a pier the word rickety was coined for, and the smell of the water, low at the best of tides, is a bit ripe. Nevertheless, this is an authentic Keys hangout. If you wear your shirt with the alligator on it, your madras Bermuda shorts and your black ankle socks, you might get a few hostile stares from the regulars (three-day growths and Durango caps) but Roy`s is basically a pretty friendly place. Beer is a buck a can, there is no food (the kitchen was torched by an incendiary ex-girlfriend) but there is an obligatory pool table and anyone who wants to can sing at the bar-side mike. You used to be able to see the drive-in`s movies from out front before they shut the drive-in. As Bad Boy Roy puts it, Cow Key Marina is a ``funky old dump,`` which makes it perfect for watching sunsets.

MY UNCLE SI Meyerwitz (mother`s twin, they`ll be 80 together this October, God willing) says he and a bunch of his friends used to drive down from Miami and find a guest house and they`d all pile in a room and maybe it would cost them a buck apiece. This was either two or four decades in the past (Si`s sense of time is Dali-esque) but a couple of years ago when he and a bunch of his friends drove down the Keys in a 10-year-old Impala, the cheapest room we could find them was $46,

and that was at one of the Ramada-Holiday-Hilton inns, out on the Boulevard, across from the Gulf and next to the shopping centers.

Uncle Si and his pals said they`d rather go back to Miami so we took them to the Half Shell Raw Bar at what is now called, picturesquely, Land`s End Village. Here, Si pronounced the shrimp ``delicious`` and delighted in pointing out the shrimp boats in the Gulf. He and his friends ignored the ``Eat It Raw`` sign and concentrated on their corn, their potatoes and their conch fritters.